Personal Essay – I Still Read Your Horoscope

I used to write poems.

I always thought it was dumb to write poems.

I still think this.

I should probably write poems again.

* * *

Purple.

For almost a decade, I have been searching for a copy of a particular poem I wrote when I was fourteen. I hadn’t been able to remember if it was actually any good or not, but I remembered everything else about it and around it. I have been piecing together lost moments of lost years lately, and somehow, finding this poem became critical. An obsession.

I remember writing it. It still feels so recent and familiar—sitting in the Main Hall computer lab at my all-girls school, eating shitty vanilla-cream sandwich cookies from the snack machine while furiously typing every line that danced out of my achey little heart. It was a soul dictation. An angsty, adolescent soul dictation written during the last twenty minutes of a lunch period and due to be placed in Judy Chu’s hot little hands by the end of the day.

Ms. Chu was my 9th grade English teacher. She loved my writing. I loved her for loving my writing.

* * *

Jump cut to 10th grade. Now I’m sixteen. I’m sixteen, and I’m wearing my skin inside-out. I’m so raw and exposed that a passing breeze can light my nerves on fire. I feel everything, and all of it hurts. I don’t show up when I’m supposed to, and I rarely turn in my homework. Because I fucking can’t.

Instead, I’m drinking and smoking and using and bingeing and starving and crying. Crying, crying, crying. All the time. The Big Feelings had established their roots in my limbic system years ago (7th grade? 8th grade? hard to say), and by 10th grade, they had swallowed me whole.

So when my final poem is due in Ms. Lipschutz’s creative writing class, I dig through my archives. Because at this point, if I do turn in my homework, you’re either getting copied answers or recycled assignments from brighter days gone by. Sorry, but what do you want from me? I’M ON FIRE. This is the best I can do.

I find the poem. The 9th-grade-Main-Hall-computer-lab poem. “Purple,” I had titled it. I have no memory of that title or of the poem, but I turn it in and pass it off as new material. And Ms. Lipschutz likes it. Her sweet, rubbery face lights up when she reads it aloud a second time for the class. What a strange lady, I think. I fall asleep on my desk.

The school year ends, I am stuffed to the gills with SSRIs, and I hate myself more than ever. I am not sober. I attend all of the end-of-year ceremonies that seem to be de rigueur at girls’ schools. There is always a piano processional and polite clapping at these ceremonies. And I always smile and polite-clap for as long as I can, or until I’m swept away by the undertow of my own, ever-present shame and taken elsewhere.

Shame has always done that to me. My heart races, the abusive thoughts get louder and more intrusive, and then, without warning, all frequencies turn to static, drowning out everything around me and lulling me into a fantasy world.

I’m at one of these end-of-year ceremonies, watching all of the shiny pennies collect their awards and accolades. The deafening, internal refrain of, ‘You are a total fuck-up; you will never be happy,’ is about to reach fever pitch and give way to the static. I can feel it. But I am jolted back into the moment by the Head of School calling Rachel Abelson to the stage to present the latest edition of Outlook, the annual student-run literary journal.

Rachel Abelson is a class-of-2000 senior, the co-editor of Outlook, and the best writer I have ever known in real life. She is tall and complicated. She has enviously large breasts and unapologetically cold, blue eyes. She wears Doc Martins and vintage sweaters with our required school uniform pants. (We are also allowed to wear uniform skirts, but Rachel always wears pants.) Her hair is often messy. She barely speaks, and when she does, she speaks with purpose. Most importantly, Rachel Abelson is exactly who I want to be.

Rachel’s writing is so sharp and nuanced and original that it makes me sick with jealousy. Once, in a poem, she described her vagina as “that Saturn sunset just below my dust-bunny navel” or something like that. I’m sorry, but what 17-year-old comes up with shit that good? It’s not even fair.

She has probably already had sex, I thought when I heard that line for the first time. She is just too fucking good.

Anyhow, Rachel takes the stage, thanks the Head of School, and coyly tells the audience that she and the Outlook staff believe that the new millennium is going to mark an incredible epoch in modern literature.

“As evidenced by the works produced by the young writers in Ms. Lipschutz’s classes this year,” Rachel declares, “the literary world should brace itself for something exciting and incredible.”

A lofty claim, I think to myself.

She continues, “To give you an idea of what we all have to look forward to, the editors of Outlook would like to read one of our favorite submissions this year, written by an extraordinarily gifted and talented member of the class of 2002. This is ‘Purple’ by Rachel Broderick.”

And with that, Rachel Abelson reads my poem. What. The. Fuck. Rachel Abelson—who I worship and who has never spoken a single word to me—reads my poem.

Everyone claps.

My parents are in the audience somewhere.

Maybe they are all just polite-clapping. I don’t know, and I don’t care. Because for the rest of that afternoon and pieces of the days following, I do not hate myself.

* * *

My grandfather is gone.

This weekend marked the first time I have ever been to Boston and not seen him. The entire city feels amiss. Everything is gray, and all the buttons are in the wrong buttonholes. And since thirty-two years of being greeted on trips back east with a signature Jim Broderick “Ho-ho!” don’t come to a close without some kind of emotional undoing, I’m all choked up and writing this on an airplane.

I’m a crier by nature, but these tears are the kind that I’m not comfortable letting go of. Letting go of these tears just facilitates letting go of my grandfather, and at this point, I’d rather make a burning nest of them in the back of my throat than let them fall.

Dramatic, perhaps, but I can be a dramatic person. I think he enjoyed that about me.

People have been asking me since his passing last month, “Were you close?” It’s a well-meaning question, but it’s also unanswerable. Far is not the opposite of close, I realize, but all I can think to say is, “We were close and we were far.”

My younger brother, Sam, and I grew up in California. My parents are both Bostonians and the oldest of five, and our nuclear family is the only contingent on either side to have made a home outside of New England. Consequently, my grandfather was not a part of my day-to-day existence; he wasn’t someone I ever expected to be at my recitals or school plays (although he and my grandmother did fly out to watch me ham it up as Mame in Auntie Mame when I was in 10^th grade), and I never spent a Christmas with him.

But Sam and I did spend every June counting down the days until we would fly to Boston for the summer’s end. We could never sleep the night before a flight to back east, and we would squeal with excitement when the Super Shuttle pulled up to our house in the darkness of 5 a.m. to ferry us to the airport.

My friends would brag about their upcoming family vacations to places like Disneyworld and the San Diego Wild Animal Park, and I just remember smiling and feeling sorry for them. This was partly because my mother was (and remains) exceptionally vocal about the repulsiveness of popular, commercial vacation destinations, but mostly because I knew that Disneyworld couldn’t possibly hold a candle to what we had in New England. And so much of what we had was about Grandpa and his brilliant, hilarious clan of Brodericks.

I loved going back east because I felt special there. Special, wanted, and important. As far back as I can remember, my grandfather—a genius by virtue of his Harvard graduate degree alone in my eyes—seemed genuinely interested what I had to say. He loved dissecting people’s motivations and internal processes. Even as a child, I knew that Grandpa was interested in my experience of the world and that he took me seriously. And I was definitely a little girl who wanted to be taken seriously.

I never had to hustle for my worth with him or prove that my opinions and experiences were worthy of serious consideration; this was a given. As an adult, I’m still trying to figure out what real intimacy actually means, but I’m pretty sure it has something to do with being seen—really and truly seen. Being seen by others is fundamentally all we want as human beings, and Grandpa always made me feel seen. If the speeches at his memorial this weekend were any indication, he made everyone feel this way.

So where do we go from here? What does my grandmother do when she wakes up each morning to an empty space in the bed next to her? How do I accept that the absence I feel isn’t just the result of allowing too much time to lapse between visits, but rather the result of a final, permanent shift?

I have no answers. This is all new to me. Death in the family is, for the most part, new to me—I’m lucky this way. I suppose I should spend some time being grateful that I still have three more grandparents who are alive and kicking…or at least pantomiming some version of kicking. I am grateful for this. I really am. But still, nothing about this feels okay. We are now in after. It’s uncomfortable. Unacceptable.

I’m terrible with endings, conclusions, goodbyes, partings, closing arguments, and letting go as a general practice (ask anyone), so I think I’ll end by saying thank you.

Thank you for making me feel like the most interesting person in the entire world every single time we spoke. Thank you for teaching me to appreciate a well thought-out garden and Eames chairs. Thank you for the childhood games of Keep Away and the force-feedings of classical music. Thank you for telling Grandma that you were struck by how beautiful I grew up to be after our visit last spring. She told me. I cried. Thank you for all of it. To borrow from your own words to my father just before you left us, I’ve enjoyed it all.

We all have.

I love you.

***